“You arrested him for possession of illegal weapons. I remember you said you were trying to leverage access to his kid to get him to turn state’s evidence,” he said. “But Logan’s always been close to Shepherd, so I’d assumed he was just yanking your chain.”
Merlo held out his hand, and Tancredi passed him the incident report. “So had I,” he admitted as he flicked through the pages. “Until his lawyer ended up in intensive care and Logan stopped talking to us. You’re sure this Nathan Cochrane is connected to the driver? Her name’s… Lowry.”
“Same address,” Tancredi said. “And records show that he was who she called before we booked her.”
Merlo shook his head. “There was no connection to Shepherd. We looked. Besides, it’s not like him to use a proxy, especially not such an unlikely one. He either does his own dirty work or he goes through the club.”
“Not always,” Bass said. The grim edge to his voice was another slip, but this time he was the only one who noticed it. He drained his coffee to the dregs and set the mug on the table. “If Shepherd knew that Logan was going to take that deal, then Logan’s days are numbered. The minute he sent me or one of the Brothers to take this lawyer out, then Logan would know that too.”
Merlo nodded. “And he’d have real motivation to take any deal we offer, even if it is only to move him out of state.”
“I recommend Utah,” Bass said dryly. He ignored Tancredi’s curious look—Merlo didn’t need to bother. He’d been filled in on Bass’s history when they started—and shifted back on topic. “So Shepherd used this Cochrane as an in-between, someone Logan wouldn’t know was attached to the club, to set up the accident—”
“Except he wasn’t there, remember?” Tancredi interrupted. She pulled a photo out of the file and slid it to the middle of the table. “This was the driver, Rebecca Lowry. She’s forty-five, she works three days a week in LA as an interior designer, and has a three-year-old son with Cochrane.”
The woman in the photo was probably pretty on a good day, but it obviously hadn’t been one of those. Her makeup stood out garishly in stripes of peach and teal against shock-pale skin, and mascara trailed muddy tracks down her cheeks to the corner of her naked mouth. Her blond hair was blown out in a perfect tousled fluff around all that devastation.
If she’d had a good day, Bass might not have recognized her.
“Right now she’s a junkie in a trailer up past the Retreat,” he said as he unfolded himself from the chair. “She was there when I went to see Shepherd today. He’d given her a dose of some new synthetic he had on hand.”
“Are you sure?” Merlo asked.
Bass shrugged. “She hasn’t had her roots done lately and she’s ridden herself hard, but it’s the same woman.”
Tancredi shook her head. “That’s not possible. We ran a background check, ran her against Shepherd’s known aliases, and there wasnoconnection to Shepherd or the Brothers. Lowry’s a wannabe socialite who’s on the board of her kid’s preschool. She’s not the sort of girl who runs with a biker gang.”
“You’d be surprised,” Bass said. “Some people like it rough.”
“There’s rough and there’s Shepherd,” Tancredi said. “He’s industrial sandpaper, and I’ve seen that trailer when we raided it. It’s gross, and your feet stick to the floor. You don’t go from a mimosa brunch to that in a month.”
Bass put a finger on the edge of the photo and turned it around. She wouldn’t be the first perp to practice her crocodile tears on the booking sergeant, as though being sad you got caught was the same thing as remorse, but he didn’t think so. It was hard to fake the pallor or the slack confusion that softened Lowry’s mouth. She looked genuinely traumatized.
“Maybe not after you’ve run a man down and heard him screaming,” he said. “After that you might think what Shepherd has to offer is what you deserve. And your boyfriend, or whatever Cochrane is to her, might start to have second thoughts about their involvement with the Brothers.”
“In which case it would make sense for Shepherd to send someone like you to remind Cochrane that things could still get worse,” Merlo said with a slow nod. “It fits the pieces we have. Just because it’s a good story doesn’t mean that it’s true, though. All we have is a receipt with a name on it and a coincidence, albeit a compelling one. We need evidence if this is going to mean anything.”
That put it squarely back in Bass’s court, didn’t it? It was why he was there—to get something they could use to take Shepherd’s feet from under him hard enough that he didn’t have time to damage control, threaten, and bribe his way out of it.
“If we’re correct,” he said, “then Cochrane’s scared. But maybe he’s not scared enough. Right now he’s trying to come up with a way out of this mess, but he still thinks that he can get away free and clear. What if I go in and impress on him that he isn’t going to? He’s made his bed, and he’s going to get fucked over in it.”
Merlo grimaced at the crude metaphor, but Tancredi had already started to nod her agreement.
“Then when we come in and offer him protection,” she said, “he’ll be desperate enough to take the deal.”
“He’d need to be,” Merlo said grimly. Then he admitted, “It could work.”
None of them looked happy with the plan. They were going to take advantage of a man’s fear for his girlfriend’s safety to get him to put his own life at risk. But it was the only idea on the table. Bass waited for a moment, just to see if anyone could come up with something better.
When they didn’t, he scooped his phone off the table and slotted it into his hip pocket.
“I guess I get to go and beat up a urologist, then,” he said with a bleak sort of humor. “At least if he ends up pissing blood, he can take care of it himself.”
